Standby machine for disaster recovery restore ?

I use SME 9.2 for our office email and keeping a little data in the i-bays. It's a small setup of say 5 users with a few years email.

It's sitting on an oldish PC and works very well, however I'd like to have an 'easy' disaster recovery plan in place. I've set up a 'twin' machine of the same type and specification (Both Dells of the same model) with the idea that I should be able to switch on the spare machine and restore directly from the NAS back ups I run. This machine has SME9.x plus the same contribs.

If a recovery is required it's certain that the install on the spare machine will be out of date, so an update process will be needed at some point in the process. This is something I'd usually do from the web based /server-manager/ and copy paste the contribs update commend from the alert email. Ideally I'd do this post restore.

My question is, is this plausible ?

I'm out of office a fair bit so need to try and get something in place that's relatively easy to do should I not be around.

If you only turn on the back up machine periodically you will have to wait for it to boot, run updates, and the restore from your backups,k and can you do that all remotely ??

That will take as long as it takes.

If you want a faster restore then run the backup machine as an Affa backup. You can dictate how often it runs backups, and if the main machine goes down you can 'Rise' the Affa box in minutes. It means the machine is on and you can update it as you go. You can shell in and access/rise at a command prompt if required - that may not be so easy with your proposed method.

(I think some people actually have the Affa box on a timer to wake it, run a backup, and put it to sleep again, if you don't want it running 24/7 - question is whether you can wake it remotely when you need to do a restore)

You pays your money and you takes your choice....

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AffaI have not used it for years, but Affa was practically magical for this use case when I did use it:- Full system backup (including snapshots) maintained on a second system- One line command to convert the backup system into a running clone of the active server for disaster recovery

Properly configured, all you need is remote access to the network to convert the backup server into the "live" server.

Restore during setupIf your situation can handle the recovery time, you could schedule a regular backup of the primary SME server to a USB drive, then practice regular system restores from "bare metal" (boot the install disk, restore during setup). You would need to identify and document separate backup procedures anything for that is not included in this process, since it is possible to add software or web apps to your SME server that are not included in the USB backup by default.

Roll your ownYou can also create your own manual backup using rsync or scp. I still use a variation of smeclone.sh script in Bug 5701 to migrate a SME server to new hardware. That script is intended for upgrading rather than backup -- but it includes notes that may be useful if you want to roll your own disaster recovery system.

Simplicity probably trumps reduced down time, especially if it's something I can do remotely say via a logmein style login to one of the client machines here.

In the past I have restored the system 'long hand' and have notes to that, but it would be nice to have something less reliant on me being physically present in place.

One of the problems I recall with turning on the backup box 'as is' is that it shares the same IP as the 'live' one which causes issues, but I guess if I am only pulling down updates that can be changed, as long as it's in the correct ip range.

yum clean allyum update commend as it had not been on for 12 months or so. It turned out that I hadn't installed any contribs so I quickly added these (Roundcube, diskusage and fetchmail) to match my production server.

Affa installed, I added and amended the config file by swapping the IP addresses as above, sent the key and now seem to have completed a back up.

It really is very easy and the documentation page on the money. My biggest problem was working out how to create and edit the config file

A couple of questions -

Do I need to set up a cron job to schedule repeat runs of the job, or does the config take care of this ?

Reading the notes, it looks like I can test the machine with a 'Raise', and then a 'Undo-rise'. Once undone it would seem it reverts to being a back-up box with no further action needed ?

The time the job will run. Use exactly 4 digits, no colon, no point. Important: Using the proper format HHMM is essential. Badly formatted TimeSchedule will cause strange Perl errors. Multiple runs can be achieved by repeating the line for each run time.

TimeSchedule 0601TimeSchedule 1001TimeSchedule 2001Then make the jobs with this (it has some double documentation I'll fix)

Quote

affa --make-cronjobsConfigures the cronjobs as scheduled in the jobs records. By default this command will by executed by 'cronjobs' every 15 minutes. So you don't need to run this command manually, you can also just wait max. 15 minutes before your updates job configurations become effective.

You can use this to check jobs:

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affa --configcheckChecks the syntax and values in all configuration files found in /etc/affa/. Run this command after modifying the configuration. Lower/Upper case errors in property names are corrected automatically.

Yes, Rise and Undo-Rise should work but YMMV

Please test and let us know if you have any issues.

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** The following packages are installed on (production server IP),* but they are missing on this backup host:*libmcrypt-2.5.8-9.el6perl-Data-Uniqid-0.12-2.el6perl-TermReadKey-2.30-13.el6perl-File-Copy-Recursive-0.38-4.el6perl-Parse-RecDescent-1.965-1.el6php-mcrypt-5.3.3-5.el6perl-Test-Pod-1.40-1.el6perl-Unicode-String-2.09-12.el6php-pear-Mail-mimeDecode-1.5.5-1.el6perl-Mail-IMAPClient-3.37-1.el6perl-NTLM-1.09-1.el6perl-IO-Tee-0.64-1.el6imapsync-1.684-1.el6

** The following packages are installed on both,* the source (Production Server IP) and on this backup host,* but the version does not match:*gpg-pubkey-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxsqlite-3.7.17-9.el6.smeI assume it may be legacy stuff as they are not RPMs\Contribs I've knowingly installed as stand alone items. Is it reasonable to ignore ?

On the time schedule, I'll want to keep the existing daily back up arrangement to NAS for now so I guess best to try and avoid an over lap. Belt and Braces and all that.

Yes Affa backup server (with rise function) works great, the backup server can even be at a remote location for added security. Watch out for data transfer/speed limits & time it takes to complete a backup. If you have Gigabytes worth of files changing, then backup can take a long time & maybe even exceed monthly bandwidth allowance.

If the backup server is local (on LAN) no problems.

One word of warning/catch22 issue, is that if your sme server acts as gateway, & it goes down/fails, then you may not have remote access via ssh or whatever to do rising etc from a remote location. ie if your sme server is down then you will not have incoming internet access for remote control & configuration etc.

You can create a step by step set of instructions for the most technically literate person to follow, &/or you can talk them through the steps over the phone.

Nothing worse than a server going down when you are away on holiday so be well prepared & test test test beforehand to make sure it all really works.

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